My task this afternoon is to explore with you the reasons the American people do not
know who killed President Kennedy and why. In order to do this we will have to deal
with three interdependent conspiracies which developed in the course of the
assassination and its aftermath. These are (1) the criminal conspiracy to murder the
President by a cabal of militarists at the highest echelons of power in the United States;
(2) the conspiracy which aided and abetted these murderers after the fact, by covering
for the assassins, also a true criminal conspiracy involving an extremely wide circle of
government officials across the entire political spectrum and at all levels of government;
and (3) a conspiracy of ignorance, denial, confusion, and silence which has pervaded
our entire public.

The major focus of my talk today is this third conspiracy on the part
of the public, which includes our so-called "critical community". I want to show you
that our failure to know is not based on any lack of data or because the data is
ambiguous. It is all extremely simple and obvious. Rather we don't know because we
are deeply emotionally resistant to what such knowledge tells us about ourselves and
our society. Furthermore the powers-that-be do not reward people for such knowledge.
Indeed if a person is willing to acknowledge the truth, is in a position to share such
knowledge with the public, and wishes to do so, then the organized institutions of our
society will turn sharply against such a person.

Now this is not a new problem in the history of society. In fact, I want to read to you a
Sufi tale from the Ninth Century which can help to orient us to the problem. The tale is
entitled "When the Waters Were Changed." It goes as follows:

When the Waters Were Changed

Once upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind
with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world
which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then
be renewed with dfferent water, which would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected
water, went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for
the water to change its character.

On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went
dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his
rdtreat and drank his preserved water.

When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to
flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that
they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from
before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of having
been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they
thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not
understanding.

At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his
concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however, he
took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the
loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a different way from
everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest.
Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his
fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been
restored to sanity.

The struggle for truth in the assassination of President Kennedy confronts us with the
problem of the "waters of knowledge" versus "the waters of uncertainty." Let me give
you an example involving two important individuals who attempted to bring the truth
before the American people. I am speaking of New Orleans District Attorney Jim
Garrison and filmmaker Oliver Stone.

Both Garrison and Stone knew that the President was the victim of a conspiracy by high
level US military intelligence officials. Each in his own way tried to bring such
knowledge to the attention of the American people. In the case of Oliver Stone, even
before his film JFK had received its final cut there developed an unprecedented
campaign of slander against Stone, that he was a madman, that he was a drunk. In the
face of this attack Stone was advised to compromise and did so. He backed off from
telling the American people that his film was the truth, and instead claimed that his film,
JFK, was "my myth". In other words Stone said "I have my myth and you are entitled
to yours. I'm not saying I know what happened here. There is uncertainty." The
instant Stone did that, the campaign of slander ended. He was again acceptable. He
was invited to address Congress and was permitted to ask the government to release
more information so as to help us clear up the supposed mystery.

Jim Garrison's story is different. In the face of his effort to reveal the true nature of the
assassination there was a campaign to discredit him. It was claimed that he was a drug
addict, that he had ties to the Mafia, that he was grandstanding and self seeking. But
Garrison never backed down. And because of that, even today a noted biographer
cannot get a major publisher to enter into a contract to do an honest biography of the
man. He is still an outcast, a madman as far as the society is concerned. Stone agreed
to drink the waters of uncertainty and society recognized him as having miraculously
recovered his sanity. Garrison refused, insisting on continuing to drink the waters of
knowledge, and for this he suffered accordingly.

Not too long ago I received a letter from a lawyer and leading human rights activist in
Bangladesh. Her name is Sultana Kamal, and in commenting on my book, History Will Not
Absolve Us, she wrote the following: "There are so many ways human
beings invent to humiliate their basic sense of dignity --- the sense of dignity which
comes from the courage to acknowledge the truth. Instead we choose to live in
falsehood to make ourselves instrumental in remaking conditions which bring us
indignity, loss of self esteem and again bind us to the task of reconditioning the evil
cycles of denial of truth and justice to ourselves."

WHAT THE WATERS OF KNOWLEDGE TELL US

Over and over again we hear people asking for more and more information from the
government. I suggest to you that the problem is not that we have insufficient data.
The problem is that we dare not analyze the data we have had all along. In fact we need
very little data. Honestly, as far as I'm concerned you can throw almost the whole 26
volumes of the Warren Commission in the trash can. All you need to do is look at this.

Here [left] is the Warren Commission drawing of the path of the "magic" bullet. And here is
a photograph of the hole in the President's jacket.

Now what does this tell
us? It tells us without a shadow of a doubt that the President's throat wound was an
entry wound, and that there was a conspiracy without any question. But it tells us much
more. It tells us that the Warren Commission knew that the conspiracy was obvious
and that the Commission was engaged in a criminal conspiracy after the fact to obstruct
justice. The Chief Justice of the United States was a criminal accessory to the murder
of the President. Senator Arlen Specter is a criminal accessory to murder. The Warren
Report was not a mistake; it was and is an obvious act of criminal fraud.

Think of this for a moment. The Warren Report is an obvious criminal act of fraud and
no history department in any college or university is willing to say so. What does such
silence mean?

It means that we are dealing with something that has effected every history department
of every college and university in our society, every major newspaper and magazine, and
all means of mass communication. It has effected virtually every "loyal American."
This phenomenon is what George Orwell in his novel 1984 called "crimestop" or
"protective stupidity".

According to Orwell, "crimestop" is really a form of self mind control in which we find
the effected individual "stopping short, as if by instinct, at the threshold of any
dangerous thought... not grasping analogies... failing to perceive logical errors...
misunderstanding the simplest arguments... and being bored or repelled by any train of
thought" if such is inimicable to the powers that be.

As a clinician, I look at "crimestop" as a mass psychological illness, an involuntay
intellectual emotional and spiritual illness, part of the psychology of war which has
pervaded our society.

So let us go on and ask who was Lee Harvey Oswald. I suggest to you that it is equally
obvious that Oswald was a CIA agent from the data the Warren Commission provided
to us. Look at the relevant chapter in Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact,
which was published in 1967. Indeed, what Meagher did was to confirm what
Harold Feldman, with the help of Vincent Salandria, had already suggested in
The Nation magazine even before the release of the Warren Report. If you look at
History Will Not Absolve Us, you will find that Castro could see this
immediately by knowing how to read our press. And Castro was not the only one who
saw this.

The following is the text of an internal memorandum from the Assistant Attorney General of the United States to President Johnson's press secretary Bill Moyers, written just three days after the assassination:

Memorandum for Mr. Moyers

It is important that all of the facts surrounding
President Kennedy's assassination be made public
in a way which will satisfy people in the United
States and abroad that all the facts have been told
and that a statement to this effect be made now.

The public must be satisfied that Oswald
was the assassin; that he did not have confederates
who are still at large; and that the evidence was
such that he would have been convicted at trial.

Speculation about Oswald's motivation
ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis
for rebutting thought that this was a Communist
conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying)
a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the
Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald
seem about too pat --- too obvious (Marxist, Cuba,
Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out
statements on the Communist conspiracy theory,
and it was they who were in charge when he was
shot and thus silenced.

The matter has been handled thus far with
neither dignity nor conviction. Facts have been
mixed with rumor and speculation. We can
scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of
the Dallas police when our President is murdered.

I think this objective may be satisfied by
making public as soon as possible a complete and
thorough FBI report on Oswald and the
assassination. This may run into the difficulty of
pointing to inconsistencies between this report and
statements by Dallas police officials. But the
reputatlon of the Bureau is such that it may do the
whole job.

The only other step would be the appointment
of a Presidential Commission of unimpeachable
personnel to review and examine the evidence and
announce its conclusions. This has both advantages
and disadvantages. I think it can await publication
of the FBI report and public reaction to it here
and abroad.

I think, however, that a statement that all the
facts will be made public property in an orderly
and responsible way should be made now. We
need something to head off public speculation or
Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach

Deputy Attorney General

There are two aspects of this
memorandum to which I want to draw your attention. First we see written proof that
Attorney General Robert Kennedy's aide was engaged in a criminal conspiracy to cover
up the crime three days after the fact. But there is another aspect. Look what
Katzenbach says about the frame-up of Oswald. "Unfortunately the facts on Oswald
seem about too pat -- too obvious..." What does this mean? It means Katzenbach can
see that this guy has been set up.

So we have to ask ourselves, "Who can murder the President, frame a CIA agent, and
command this kind of cover?" I am not going to reiterate what Vince Salandria has
presented to you. As we knew at the time, Kennedy had begun a process of
rapprochement with the USSR and had been making clear moves away from the Cold
War. The very simple and obvious question is, Who had the means and motive to
organize a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, frame in advance a CIA agent
for the murder, use immediately all media channels to spill the frame-up of Oswald to
the world, have the White House radioing Air Force One on the way back from Dallas
that Oswald was it before the Dallas police had anything on him? Who can do all this
and command a complete cover-up by all our society's institutions? Only one institution
had the means and motive to accomplish all this, an element of the United States
government that is so necessary to the "defense" of the nation that to expose it would
be unthinkable -- the answer is obvious -- high US military intelligence.

But I want to take us a step further, because today the truth is not just that our military
intelligence assassinated our President. Today, thirty-five years later, such an assertion
is a half-truth. The full truth today must include an acknowledgment that the source of
the assassination conspiracy was knowable and known at the time, and continues to be.
The full truth requires that we acknowledge that every leading institution of this
society has cooperated in covering up the President's murder.

WHY THE COVER-UP WAS NECESSARY

At the time of the assassination what would have happened if it had been acknowledged
that the assassination had been a high level conspiracy of the US military intelligence
apparatus? I suggest to you that if this truth had been acknowledged early on, our own
CIA and military would have emerged as leading threats to freedom, democracy and
peace here at home as well as throughout the world. Such an awareness on the part of
a significant portion of our public would have led to the fragmentation of our society,
and to a level of domestic turmoil which would have disrupted America's international
empire. Think of the potential function of such truth in the context of the political
movements of the 60's. In no way could the United States have prosecuted the
Vietnam War under those circumstances. An enormous anti-militarist opposition
would have thwarted much of what our military intelligence has perpetrated over the
years in Latin America, and around the world.

What does all this tell us about ourselves? Well, one of the implications is that we have
a very strange sort of democracy. It is a democracy in which the press is so free that the
President can't have sex with a White House intern without being hauled before the
court of public opinion, but the military intelligence establishment can openly assassinate
the President and escape without any serious effort by that press to call it to account.
The President Iying in a civil deposition, and supposedly obstructing justice over
something that is totally meaningless, gets infinite attention from our media. This, while
clear obstruction of justice in the murder of a President passes in silence. To see such a
thing is to realize when we call ourselves "free" and "democratic", we are wrapping
ourselves in the window dressing of a modern militarist empire --- an empire of which we are
but subjects. Granted, ladies and gentlemen, some of us in this country may be
privileged subjects, maybe even the majority of us are privileged subjects, but when the
day is done, that is what we are --- subjects. We are not citizens of a free democratic
society, but subjects of a modern version of the Roman Empire. I suggest to you that
this is a truth about ourselves which most Americans would rather not hear, because we
Americans love to bask in the illusion that we are a beacon to the world, that we are
freer and more democratic than the poor of the world whom our tax dollars have so
effectively help to murder and suppress.

This is the truth which the powers that be have no interest in the American people
knowing and which the American people are more than happy to be protected from.
Under such conditions it isn't hard to motivate people to avoid the truth. It is only
necessary to supply them with a workable lie. But just what lie would serve this
purpose? What lie could bind the society together and allow people to preserve their
illusory identity as "citizens of a free democratic state"? Here we come to the "waters
of uncertainty"

THE WATERS OF UNCERTAINTY

The lie that was destined to cover the truth of the assassination was the lie that the
assassination is a mystery, that we are not sure what happened, but being free citizens of
a great democracy we can discuss and debate what has occurred. We can petition our
government and join with it in seeking the solution to this mystery. This is the essence
of the cover-up.

The lie is that there is a mystery to debate, and so we have pseudo debates, debates
about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false. This is the
form that Orwell's crimestop has taken in the matter of the President's murder. I am
talking about the pseudo debate over whether the Warren Report is true when it is
obviously and undebatably false, the pseudo debate over whether the Russians, or the
Cubans, or the Mafia, or Lyndon Johnson, or some spinoff from the CIA killed the
President. These are all part of the process of crimestop which is designed to cover up
the obvious nature of this assassination. And let us not forget the pseudo debate over
whether JFK would or would not have escalated in Vietnam, as if a President who was
obviously turning against the cold war and was secretly negotiating normalization of
relations with Cuba, would have allowed the military to trap him into pursuing our War
in Vietnam.

Since the publication of History Will Not Absolve Us, what I have found most
striking is the profound resistance people have to the concept of pseudo debate, a
resistance in people which is manifest as an inability or unwillingness to grasp the
concept and to use it to analyze their own actions and the information that comes
before them. Even amongst "critics" who are very favorably disposed to my book, I
note a consistent avoidance of this concept. And I see this as part of the illness, a very
dangerous manifestation of the illness, which I want to discuss further.

THE MALIGNANT NATURE OF PSEUDO DEBATE

Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo debate is a benign activity, that it
simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case.
I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or
there is no debate. In the case of pseudo debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo
debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is
all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to
the pseudo debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even
aware that he is being passed a premise; it is so subtle that the premise just passes into
the person as if it were reality. This prernise -- that there is uncertainly to be resolved --
seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water.

But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are
willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink
such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.

That the entire establishment has been willing to join in this process of cover-up by
confusion creates an extreme form of problem for anyone who would seek to utter the
truth. For these civilian institutions -- the media, the universities and the government--
once they begin engaging in denial of knowledge of the identity of the assassins, once
they are drawn into the cover-up, a secondary motivation develops for them. Now they
are not only protecting the state, they are now protecting themselves, because to expose
the obviousness of the assassination and the false debate would be to reveal the corrupt
role of all these institutions. And there is no question that these institutions are masters
in self protection. Thus anyone who would attempt to confront the true cover-up must
be prepared to confront virtually the entire society. And in doing this, one is inevitably
going to be marginalized.

THE ROLE OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY

It is at this point that we can begin to look at the role of the "critical community" in this
process, but before I do this I want to examine the role of Robert F. Kennedy.

When I have tried to point out to people that Robert F. Kennedy, in cooperating with
the cover-up, became in every sense of the word an accessory after the fact in his own
brother's murder, there has generally been an instant recoil. But I want to tell you., that
this is not an opinion; this is just a fact. There is no way we can deny this, if we think
about it. I'm not talking about why he became an accessory, but the fact that he did is
absolutely undeniable. Robert F. Kennedy had a legal sworn obligation to seek out the
assassins, and in failing to do so he joined the criminal act of conspiracy with the
criminal act of cover-up and sealed the deal. And don't let anyone tell you that it was
because he couldn't put two words together after his brother was murdered. I have
seen his correspondence with Ray Marcus. And if it were some kind of personal
emotional reaction, how is it that none of the people surrounding Robert Kennedy could
utter the obvious truth of the assassination? No, Robert Kennedy's cooperation,
agonizing and humiliating as it must have been for him, was dictated by political
considerations, which led him away from his legal and moral obligation to tell the
American people what he knew.

When I start talking to people about this, I hear Robert Kennedy's actions defended
with the idea that if he had spoken out he would have been marginalized. And this is
important, because maybe that was part of Robert Kennedy's motivation. But I think the
person who responds to me in this way is telling me something about his or her own
motivation. The person is telling me that in their opinion, the desire not to be
marginalized can somehow justify Iying to the public about what you do and don't know
about the assassination of the President. I want to say in no uncertain terms this Iying is
not only profoundly lacking in morality but is in addition profoundly foolish and is
totally indefensible. It was indefensible for Robert Kennedy and it is indefensible for any
one of us.

There is no justification whatsoever for Iying to anyone about what you do and don't
know about this murder. Quite to the contrary, if telling the truth marginalizes you,
then that
is the place to be. After all, if enough people are willing to be marginalized, then before
you know it, society has developed a different center. This is the politics of truth. But
Robert Kennedy wasn't really used to the politics of truth. Instead, he was captivated
by the illusory politics of power, influence and access. And I am afraid that many of us
are also caught up with such ideas.

So now we have come to a problem. Our society confronts the individual with a choice:
"If you want to avoid marginalization, you compromise the truth." And the problem is
that the moment you compromise with the truth, the moment you contribute false
uncertainty, at that moment you have joined the cover-up. This is the critical point.
Another way of saying this is, that society is prepared to confer a reward to anyone
who is willing to drink the waters uncertainty. The reward is legitimacy; the reward is
credibility; the reward is access; the reward is rescue from being marginalized.

I understand that the pressure to compromise the truth is enormous, because our society
finds the truth and it implications so repugnant. Any normal person wants to be able to
communicate. A normal person doesn't want to be isolated, doesn't want to turn
people off. But in being concerned that the truth as we know it will turn off our
neighbor, in compromising and pretending we do not know, for the sake of having
"credibility", we are destined to become part of the problem rather than part of the
solution. We are destined to become agents of the public confusion and denial.

So there can be no doubt about what I am saying, I need to examine specifics examples
of how the so-called "critical community" has been operating.

THE ASSASSINATION RECORDS REVIEW BOARD

Given what I have set before you, the whole effort by the "critical community" to
petition the United States Government to establish a Board which would assist it in
resolving the "mystery" of the assassination, such an effort represents precisely the
process described by Sultana Kamal in which people "choose to live in falsehood, to
make ourselves instrumental in remakcing conditions which bring us indgnity, loss
of self esteem and again bind us to the task of reconditioning the evil cycles of denial
of truth and justice to ourselves."

The President was assassinated, the government covered for the assassins, the media
covered for them, all the established institutions of society fell in line with this, and the
public was not prepared to take matters into its own hands. This is the sorry truth of
American democracy, and there is nothing to be done about it, other than to witness the
full horror and shame of it all, to feel the helplessness that is our reality before this state
which is in the grip of militarism and the economic interests which this militarism serves.

Our problem is not that our government lacks credibility in the eyes of many of its
subjects. That's our government's problem. Anyone who takes the government's
problem as his own problem in so doing becomes an agent of the government, if not a
government agent. And it should be clear that the government is more than happy to
have you do this.

No, our problem, the problem for people who want the truth to be known, is that
despite the lack of government credibility, the public does not have the ability to think
its way through the lies and discern the truth. The great shame of the "critical
community" is that rather than seizing on this as its mission, the critical community has
chosen to ally itself with the government and has only fostered further public confusion.

So we have a Board set up on the false premise that the problem is that the government
wasn't open enough with the public when it came to the assassination. Not one member
of the Board is capable of coming before you and stating the most simple and axiomatic
truths of this case. There was a conspiracy without a doubt. The Warren Report was
an obvious act of criminal fraud. Senator Arlen Specter should be indicted for criminal
obstruction of justice. Can any member of that Board come before you and say that?
Of course not. Because respected members of the legal and academic establishment
who can get the appropriate security clearances to serve on that Board are incapable of
speaking simple truths like this. And if you try to get them to admit this kind of thing
they look at you as if you are some kind of weirdo, or nut. And I remind you, they do
not feel that way about Oliver Stone today, because he isn't saying these are facts.
These are only theories, "myths," and he is not claiming that he knows what happened.
So he is not a problem.

In fact they can use the film JFK now, and claim they are
responding to the film through this Review Board. And COPA and JFK Lancer and all
the "respected" members of this critical community go and praise this Board and testify
before it, and they and the Board embrace each other. What is there to say? This is our
independent research community. With this as our independent research community
there is no mystery about why the public doesn't know who killed President Kennedy
and why.

I was going to read to you how the press is using the statements of various respected
researchers who are here. I was going to read to you the COPA mission statement and
dissect it --- but what is the point? For the sake of completeness and for illustration,
when
and if this speech is ever published, I'll include this as an appendix. You know I like appendices?

But I would rather, at this point, leave it up to any person individually, if they wish, to
take what I've said here, think about it and try to apply it to anything that comes before
him. If anyone is interested in doing this, I'll be happy to communicate further on an
individual basis, but really I've said enough about the "critical community".

CONCLUSION

In conclusion I want to share with you something a close friend, Professor Rudi
Cardona, pointed out after reading an earlier draft of this speech. Although Rudi has
lived in this country for many years, he was born and raised in Costa Rica and has a real
international perspective. He mentioned that throughout our history, we Americans
seem always to prefer domestic tranquility over justice and the principles which
supposedly underlie our democracy. He remarked on how a recent TV series on slavery
had shown that Washington and Jefferson knew slavery was wrong but could not bring
themselves to oppose it openly because of the turmoil this would have caused. Of
course, the turmoil they were concerned about was the turmoil that whites would feel.
The slaves were not being spared any turmoil.

And I think the analogy is very apt, because to those who would attempt to defend the
cover-up, by suggesting that the truth would have been too painful for our country to
endure, I want to remind us that the people of Vietnam were not spared the turmoil of
our military rule. The people of Latin America and South America have not been
spared. By cooperating in holding this society together through lies, we have made it
that much more possible for our military intelligence apparatus to impose enormous
suffering on people throughout the world. And this turmoil and mayhem has by no
means been ended.

On April 25th of this year [1998], Guatemalan Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera was
assassinated one day after he stood before an audience in the Metropolitan Cathedral of
Guatemala City and gave a speech in which he presented the findings of an in-depth
probe into thousands and thousands of murdered and disappeared persons, casualties of
a campaign of terror against the people of Guatemala waged by their own government,
a right wing militarist government which over the years has enjoyed the consistent
training and support of our US military intelligence establishment, the well protected
home of the assassins of President Kennedy.

I want to read to you some of the thoughts Bishop Conedera expressed in his April 24th
speech. Amongst other things he said,

"The root of humanity's downfall and disgrace comes from the deliberate opposition
to truth ... this reality that has been intentionally deformed in our country throughout
thirty-six years of war against the people.

"To open ourselves to the truth and to bring ourselves face to face with our personal
and collective reality is not an option that can be accepted or rejected. It is an
undeniable requirement of all people and all societies that seek to humanize
themselves and to be free....

"Truth is the primary word, the serious and mature action that makes it possible for
us to break the cycle of death and violence and open ourselves to a future of hope
and light for all...

"Discovering the truth is painful, but it is without a doubt a healthy and liberating
action."